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By Lyla Mehta

Shortage is taken into account a ubiquitous characteristic of the human situation. It underpins a lot of recent economics and is customary as an evidence for social company, social clash and the source crunch confronting humanity's survival on this planet. it really is made out to be an all-pervasive truth of our lives – be it of housing, nutrition, water or oil. yet has the perception of shortage been politicized, naturalized, and universalized in educational and coverage debates? Has overhasty recourse to shortage evoked a customary set of industry, institutional and technological ideas that have blocked out political contestations, overlooking entry as a sound concentration for tutorial debates in addition to guidelines and interventions? Theoretical and empirical chapters via prime lecturers and scholar-activists grapple with those concerns by means of wondering scarcity's taken-for-granted nature. They study shortage debates throughout 3 of an important assets - nutrients, water and effort – and their implications for idea, institutional preparations, coverage responses and innovation structures.

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Additional resources for The Limits to Scarcity: Contesting the Politics of Allocation

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The conference was a culmination of this project. The programme funded both the conference and my research and I thank the ESRC for this. In particular, I am very grateful to Steve Rayner, Director of the programme, who played a key role in making both the conference and this book happen. We have shared similar interests in unpacking scarcity debates and it has been great to work with him in the context of the Science and Society Programme to develop my ideas on scarcity, where he was generous with his support and ideas.

Goods are for distributing, sharing consuming or destroying publicly in one way or another. To focus on how persons relate to objects can never illuminate desire. Instead research should focus on the patterns of alliance and authority that are made and marked in all human societies by the circulation of goods. Demand for objects is a chart of social commitments graded and timetabled for the year, the decade, or the lifetime … [R]estricting consumption of goods restricts participation in the extended social conversation for which they are used.

These feed into simplistic and often inappropriate solutions that cause inaccessibility and perpetrate exclusions. Thus, the scarcity problem gets aggravated. This volume is a significant contribution on the part of leading scholars and scholar activists to question scarcity's taken-for-granted nature and assumptions. While not denying that scarcities exist for many and that our planet is in peril (not least due to the wanton overexploitation of resources and climate change), our contention is that scarcity is not a constant variable that can be blamed for all our woes.

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